of the streetlamp, and waited to see what the couple would do next. They paused, then continued toward a shack at the end of the street. Marlow couldn’t read the sign on it—until, suddenly, a light over the shack turned on and blinked three times, slowly, before going off again. Her eyes put it together in the flashes: The Drinks-at-Dawn Express, the sign said. A booze cruise. The couple hurried toward it, glancing around. Marlow did, too.
A woman in a wetsuit stood behind the counter. She looked alert and pleasant, as if it was the middle of the day and she was conducting normal business. She held her palm out. Marlow wasn’t sure how much cash she handed over. It was dark, which meant the woman couldn’t count it, either. She slipped it somewhere out of sight, beneath the splintering ledge she leaned against. “Meet on the beach at Dudley Avenue,” she said. “Two blocks that way. Wait until it’s almost light.”
Marlow killed an hour with her back against the rear wall of the stand, dozing and watching seagulls collect dropped pizza crusts. When the sky turned a thin, easy gray, she stood up and went to the beach.
The boat, moored several yards into the waves, looked like a life-size version of a toy: pale blue and white, plasticky, with a skull-and-crossbones flag hanging flaccid above the cabin and a whiskered pirate, eye patch and all, painted on the side. “Arrr You Ready?” the pirate asked in a sloppily drawn thought bubble.
Marlow took her shoes off and hurried down to where a small group had gathered around the woman in the wetsuit. The woman was gesturing expansively at the boat and the life jacket in her hand and not actually talking about either of them. She was telling them, instead, how they would cross. The Drinks-at-Dawn Express would take them straight out to a sandbar. A boat bringing supplies to Atlantis from a British shipping barge would pass by precisely twenty minutes after they dropped anchor at the sandbar. “We’ll get on the boat,” she said. “Quickly. It’ll continue on to Atlantis and dock there, near a restaurant that overlooks the marina. I’ll lead you into the basement of the restaurant, where you’ll change into standard waitstaff uniforms. The owners of the restaurant, they used to live in Connecticut. Never got over missing their parents, their brothers and sisters. They’ve been helping us for years.” She looked around the group. “After that, you’re on your own.”
A Jeep rumbled their way in the sand, its driver uniformed and bleary-eyed. VENTNOR BEACH BORDER PATROL, the lettering on the door said. Sighting it, the woman swiveled her hips and whooped. “Now, who’s ready to get faced?” she shrieked. “Sorry about that,” she mumbled when the vehicle had passed. “Last thing: the fine print. I assume you all know this if you’re here, but I have to say it anyway. The US State Department forbids travel to or from the territory now called Atlantis, formerly known as Atlantic City, New Jersey. You are aware that you’re here to do something illegal. You are about to cross into a foreign country with which America has no diplomatic relations. If you’re caught over here, you’ll go to jail. If you’re caught over there, you’ll never get back home.” She flicked her head over her shoulder at the wall, a few hundred yards down the beach. “Look how far out it goes,” she said, and Marlow did, following the slab as far as she could see into the water. “And yet,” the woman said. She smiled at them, and Marlow saw that she had a gold tooth, like the pirate on the boat. “And yet,” the woman repeated. “We can still get around it, can’t we? That’s the problem with a wall. It has to end somewhere.”
On the boat, Marlow stood at a deck railing, holding one of the cocktails they were all pretending to drink. As the light came up, she pulled off the wig and dropped it into the waves. She checked to see if anyone recognized her. But each passenger was staring resolutely at the sky as they gripped their giant glasses, pretending to be lost in the sunrise. For them, it was part of the ruse.
But Marlow really was mesmerized. She watched the colors of the sunrise bleed upward from the water. She pictured her father in his room. She pictured her mother ugly-crying over Marlow with her good side turned to the